As an increasing number of applications and services are being made available over networks such as the Internet, an increasing number of content, application, and/or service providers are turning to technologies such as cloud computing. Cloud computing, in general, is an approach to providing access to electronic resources through services, such as Web services, where the hardware and/or software used to support those services is dynamically scalable to meet the needs of the services at any given time. A user or customer typically will rent, lease, or otherwise pay for access to resources (e.g., virtual machines, block data storage, etc.) through the cloud, and thus does not have to purchase and maintain the hardware and/or software needed. For example, customers may store various digital assets (such as documents, photos, music, videos, applications) on resources of a service provider, from whom the customers may have purchased at least a subset of those assets, and the service provider may enable the customers to access their assets at any time they wish using a network connection, such as the Internet. In some cases, the customers of the service providers are individuals, while in other cases, the customers are corporations or other business entities.
While customers are generally allowed to access their digital assets at any time, there is significant uncertainty regarding the question of what happens to those assets at the time when the customer no longer exists. For example, if an individual owner of the account dies or if the company that is the owner of the account is acquired or dissolved, it can be unclear as to what happens to the digital assets in the account. Conventionally, the accounts continue to be accessible using the same credentials as before and may eventually be deactivated due to long periods of non-use or the expiration of one or more payment instruments, among other such actions. The assets can have monetary value, such as items having significant intellectual property, and/or emotional value, such as photo albums or home movies. It therefore can be desirable to provide a way to more efficiently manage the transfer of assets associated with the account during such events.